A Study of Errors in Bilingual Road, Street and Shop Signs in Iran

Abstract

Bilingual signs are becoming a regular feature of our increasingly globalized and inter-connected world. One
problem many bilingual signs suffer from is their having different linguistic errors of varying degrees of seriousness.
This study was carried out to investigate different linguistic errors, including grammatical, lexical and spelling, errors
featuring in a sample of bilingual signs in Iran. To this end, a number of Farsi-English road, street and shop signs
were randomly selected and photographed by the researcher. The pictorial data were then subjected to erroridentification
and error-analysis procedures. Findings suggest that most errors in bilingual Farsi-English signs are
lexical ones, though grammatical and other errors also have fairly high frequencies of occurrence in them.